Learn This: How to Use Social Media to Engage Candidates

As any staffing professional will tell you, there’s always something new to learn. We want to help make that learning process easier. That’s why we developed the Bullhorn Learning Hub—to make learning Bullhorn easier, faster, and more relevant.

But what about the topics outside of Bullhorn? As part of our Global Recruitment Insights and Data (GRID) report, we surveyed over 2,000 staffing professionals to discover the industry topics where they need further training and development. In this series, we’ll provide you with useful tips on the most requested subjects. First up: social media.

For a lot of staffing professionals, social media can be a lot like the brain: you know it’s important, but you’re not entirely sure how it works. Indeed, staffing pros said social media was the number one area where they felt further development and training was needed. Likewise, when we asked them to share the trends they were following most closely, respondents said they were most interested in discovering new ways to leverage social media for candidate recruitment.

With that in mind, here are some practical tips for getting the most out of your social media efforts. We’ve included tips for using social media as a staffing firm and as a recruiter.

Tips for Staffing Firms

Develop (or Refine) Your Social Media Strategy

Running social media can be deceptively complex. How do you build a following? How do you reach the right audience? What kind of content should you share? It helps to have a strategy in place to ensure your efforts make sense for your firm.

Our friends at Haley Marketing put together a marketing checklist for staffing firms, including a section for developing your presence social media. Here are some best practices to keep in mind.

Social Media Checklist: Questions to Ask About Your Strategy

Have you defined specific goals for your social marketing?

Do you have goals for specific audiences (e.g., employers, job seekers, industries?

Are your social media efforts consistent with your company brand?

Do you develop a monthly or quarterly content plan, aligned with your desired positioning?

Are you creating original content at least once a week?

Are you creating content in a variety of formats (blogs, video, infographics, etc.)?

Do you share content at least four to five times each week?

Because social media is built around sharing ideas (and content), you’ll get a lot more out of your social media presence if you have original brand-aligned content to share. It also helps to define who your target audience is. Are you hoping to target candidates, clients, or both? This will inform your social strategy.

Share The Right Content With Your Audience

What kind of content are your prospective candidates most interested in? Luckily, you can take steps to reduce the guesswork. Consider using the new Content Suggestions feature on LinkedIn. If you have a company page on LinkedIn, you’ll now be able to see content recommendations for your audience.

This features highlights articles and news items that your followers are engaging with on LinkedIn. Share the recommended articles with your followers or use them for ideas to create your own original content.

Tips for Recruiters

Know When to Reach Out to Candidates on LinkedIn

Like in the rest of life, a lot of social media success comes down to timing. So when is the best time to reach out to candidates on LinkedIn? We dug through the data to find when candidates are most likely to open and respond to messages on every medium. Here’s what we found for LinkedIn.

According toLinkedIn’s own data, mid-morning InMails get the highest response rates. Candidates are more likely to respond to your InMails on weekdays, but it doesn’t matter which weekday you choose. There is a clear loser, however: Saturday. Respondents are16 percent less likelyto respond on a Saturday.

Make sure to account for differences in time-zones. Your 9:30 AM may be someone else’s 6:30 AM, so always take that into account when sending time-targeted messages.

Perfect Your Messages to Candidates on Social Media

Of course, sending InMails is about more than timing—the content makes a big difference. LinkedIn InMails have three times the open rate of an email, but 20 percent of messages still go unread. Your subject line goes directly to a candidate’s email, so choose the information you include here carefully. It may be the only thing they see.

To make your LinkedIn InMails more effective, focus on something you have in common. If you ever worked for the same company as a prospect, make sure to bring it up—it’ll increase the likelihood of receiving a responseby 27 percent. Mutual connections bump that percentage up to an incredible 46 percent.

Finally, consider A/B testing your messages to candidates. Reach out to half of your prospective candidates with one approach in your subject headline, and try a different headline style for the other half. You may find a dramatic difference in response rates based on which approaches work best for you.

ABOUT BULLHORN

Bullhorn is the global leader in software for the staffing industry. More than 11,000 companies rely on Bullhorn’s cloud-based platform to power their staffing processes from start to finish. Headquartered in Boston, with offices around the world, Bullhorn is founder-led and employs more than 1,000 people globally. To learn more, visit www.bullhorn.com or follow @bullhorn on Twitter.

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Jonathan Novich

SVP of Product and Salesforce

Jonathan Novich is SVP of Product and Salesforce for Bullhorn, the global leader in CRM and operations software for the recruitment industry. A staffing technology innovator, he has developed broad and deep product and technical experience consulting to staffing firms over the past 15 years. Jonathan has acted as an independent consultant for some of the largest staffing companies in the world and advised companies on acquisition targets.
At Bullhorn, he oversees product initiatives as more than 10,000 staffing companies rely on Bullhorn’s cloud-based platform to drive sales, build relationships, and power their recruitment processes from end to end. He graduated with honors from Princeton University, earning a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Computer Science and a certificate in Operations Research.

Ed Holmes

SVP, Workforce & Revenue Cloud

As Bullhorn’s SVP of Workforce & Revenue Cloud, Ed drives the company’s middle office strategy and overall product offering. Ed joined Bullhorn as part of the Peoplenet acquisition where he spent 7 years as the President/CEO leading up to the acquisition in late 2017. Prior to joining the Bullhorn family, Ed has spent his career designing, building and managing technology solutions for numerous Fortune 500 companies. He has been a Partner in an ERP-focused consulting firm, a CIO for a global pharmaceutical company, a supply-chain leader for a retail company and the leader of a services company from its inception to $50MM in revenue. Ed was born in Florida but has spent the last 20+ years in Atlanta, GA. Ed loves to play golf, tennis and basketball and occasionally gets out kite boarding when the wind is just right.

Ed holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an MBA from Goizueta Business School at Emory University.

Brian Sylvester

CFO

Brian Sylvester is Bullhorn’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) with more than 15 years of financial leadership experience. Brian leads Bullhorn’s financial, accounting, and legal functions. Prior to becoming CFO, Brian spent three years at Bullhorn in various finance & accounting roles. Prior to Bullhorn, Brian was Corporate Controller at Pegasystems, a global provider of business process management software where he scaled the finance organization during a period of 2.5x revenue growth. Brian began his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers in their technology audit practice.

Brian is a CPA in Massachusetts, has a Master’s of Science in Accounting from Boston College and a Bachelor’s of Science in Accounting from Bryant University.

Tamsyn Attiwell

SVP, Customer Success

As the Senior Vice President of Customer Success, Tamsyn leads Bullhorn’s Services and Customer Success teams. She is responsible for the successful delivery of all products and services globally and is committed to creating and maintaining incredible long-term customer experiences in the Candidate to Cash process. Tamsyn has been delivering implementations for over 25 years with companies such as SAP, Ariba, Zuora and Apttus: specializing in HR, Payroll, Procurement and Quote To Cash capability. She trained as a software engineer after studying Maths, Statistics, and Computing in England.

Art Papas

Founder & CEO

Art Papas is the Founder and CEO of Bullhorn, Inc, the global leader in software for the staffing & recruitment industry. Art was the original architect of Bullhorn’s flagship Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which now helps more than 8,000 companies around the world run their businesses. Art is the Chairman of the Board at Career Collaborative, an organization that teaches unemployed and underemployed adults how to build careers that change lives and strengthen families. In 2014, Ernst & Young named Art an EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winner in New England. Prior to starting Bullhorn, Art started his career as a software engineer at Thomson Reuters. Art is a graduate of Tufts University, holding a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics.

Matt Fischer

President and Chief Technology Officer

As President and CTO, Matt leads Bullhorn’s architectural, technical, and software design and development efforts. He also directs the product management team’s work defining product strategy, and global customer support and success. Since joining Bullhorn in 2004, Matt has held a variety of leadership positions managing the growth of various technical and services teams, including Vice President of Professional Services. Prior to Bullhorn, Matt worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, specializing in systems process assurance for such companies as Fidelity and State Street Global Advisors. Matt holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance from Boston University’s School of Management.

Mike Restivo

Chief Revenue Officer

As Bullhorn’s Chief Revenue Officer, Mike drives the company’s global revenue growth. Mike was one of the first 15 team members of Bullhorn Inc. in Boston and relocated to London in 2010 to start up the International team. In his 6 years in London, Mike drove regional expansion into the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. He has supplied cloud-based solutions to recruitment consultancies in over 50 different countries worldwide for the past 10 years. Mike was born and raised in the Boston-area where he grew up an avid sport fan. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Babson College.

Kristin Machacek Leary

Chief People Officer

Kristin oversees Bullhorn’s human resources function in her role as Chief People Officer. Kristin joined Bullhorn in 2020 and is responsible for helping Bullhorn scale to the next level, build leadership capacity, and accelerate growth in global markets. Kristin brings to the role over 20 years of experience leading high-potential companies through breakthrough growth and brings a depth of knowledge in organizational design, scalable processes, and flexible systems culled from some of the most successful global companies in the world. Leary joins Bullhorn from Hitachi Vantara, where she served as Chief Human Resources Officer, and before that she worked as Chief Human Resources Officer at Forcepoint, a private equity-backed company with 3,000 employees operating in more than 45 countries. She has also worked at high-growth enterprise technology companies like Alphatec Spine, Boston Scientific, and Hewlett-Packard.

Peter Linas

Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and International

Peter oversees Bullhorn’s international operations across EMEA and APAC in his role as Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and International. Peter joined Bullhorn in 2009 and was responsible for its highly successful UK launch. In addition to growing the international team to over 50 staff and establishing Bullhorn as the UK’s market leading recruitment software in fewer than three years, Peter has expanded Bullhorn’s reach into EMEA and APAC and achieved a user base of more than 10,000 international users. Prior to taking on the launch of Bullhorn in the UK, Peter spent 20 years working in the recruitment industry and held a number of senior director roles before moving into the technology space.

Ryan Murphy

Executive Vice President of Enterprise and Salesforce

Ryan Murphy is the Executive Vice President of Enterprise and Salesforce. He began his 10-year career at Bullhorn as a finance and sales intern, affording him a 360-degree view of the software-as-a-service industry and Bullhorn’s business model. Prior to his current role, Ryan served as an Enterprise Account Executive where he honed his customer-first leadership style and championed Bullhorn’s offerings to its most strategic clients. Today, Murphy is charged with leading the enterprise strategy and go to market for both Bullhorn and Bullhorn for Salesforce, enabling customers to maximize their investments on both platforms and deliver an incredible experience to their customers and candidates. Ryan has a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from Boston University.